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  • Fort Worth: Outpost, Cowtown, Boomtown by Harold Rich
  • Rand Dotson
Fort Worth: Outpost, Cowtown, Boomtown. By Harold Rich. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Pp. xiv, 274. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-4492-4.)

Established in 1849 as a U.S. Army garrison, Fort Worth, Texas, became one of the most economically significant cities in the Southwest by the early twentieth century. Harold Rich’s book, Fort Worth: Outpost, Cowtown, Boomtown, is an insightful and well-written business and economic development history of that transformation, focusing mostly on the 1880s through World War I. The result adds much to the historiography of municipal boosterism by chronicling the efforts of Fort Worth residents who pushed relentlessly for economic and demographic expansion to propel their town into the forefront of New South cities.

In the 1880s, like most southern towns, Fort Worth resembled an over-grown country village. Despite its status as an important railroad terminus, it suffered from a variety of municipal ills, including a lack of ancillary economic development, a paucity of taxes to fund needed infrastructure improvements, and the problem of a thriving vice district, where gambling and prostitution flourished. Mirroring the efforts of other southern municipal boosters, many of Fort Worth’s businessmen decided in the late 1880s that the time had come to encourage additional economic expansion as a means to fund civic improvements and increase the city’s population. Nearby rival Dallas served as a model in that quest. Boosters’ efforts, however, resulted in little significant growth beyond a subsidized stockyard. Although Fort Worth was the most important rail center in Texas, it struggled in its mission to attract manufacturers, and as a result the city had to depend on its traditional wholesale, agriculture, and livestock industries for economic growth. However, while taxes and fines on vice proved helpful in increasing the municipality’s funds, some locals who believed “that vice complemented and stimulated downtown trade” were not enthusiastic about calls to shut down “Hell’s Half Acre,” as the city’s vice district was known (p. 61). [End Page 189]

Efforts by Fort Worth’s boosters continued in the 1890s, despite the crippling national depression that nearly bankrupted the municipal government and left the city with few funds to fix its ongoing water supply problems. By the end of the decade, Rich explains, “Fort Worth still remained more frontier than metropolis” (p. 91). The turning point for the city came in the early 1900s, when boosters offered hundreds of thousands of dollars in inducements to lure meatpacking giants Armour and Swift to the city. By 1910, the resulting economic and demographic growth made Fort Worth the fourth-largest city in Texas and tenth-largest in the South. Additional economic development followed with the advent of the oil industry and the opening of Camp Bowie, a U.S. Army training facility, owing to incentives offered by the city. Unfortunately for Fort Worth’s patrons of vice, the U.S. entry into World War I and the arrival of Camp Bowie resulted in new and effective efforts to eradicate prostitution and end access to alcohol.

While Rich does a truly excellent job of unpacking the history of Fort Worth’s transition from small town to big city, he does so predominantly with a strident focus on business and economic history. Those interested in the social or cultural history of the city, or in the lives of its working classes, will have to look elsewhere. To put Fort Worth’s economic development in context, the study mainly uses comparisons with other Texas cities, leaving opportunities to contrast it with emerging cities elsewhere in the New South unfulfilled. The author also links the efforts of Progressive reformers with those of socialists and radicals, when in fact southern reformers at the time tended to be among the more conservative-leaning members of society. These issues aside, those looking for reasons why Fort Worth emerged as one of the largest and most economically vibrant cities in the South will be well served by Rich’s fine work.

Rand Dotson
Louisiana State University Press
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